Getting a Smart Start on Your Thesis-

Achieving Academic Adulthood
by Ronda Davé, PhD
Somewhere along the thesis course, you’ll undoubtedly feel a serious lack of support in achieving your goal to finish. You may find yourself confused about what to do next, overwhelmed with all you need to do, abandoned and alone with little or no help from others, even alienated from academe. These feelings of being confused, overwhelmed, alone, or alienated are what students mean when they say they feel a lack of support. Feeling supported, in contrast, means feeling integrated into a system of friendly, helpful, competent people who have your best interests at heart, and who continually provide the impetus and resources you need to move toward finishing.
You may wonder whether it’s a deliberate part of the thesis process to be admitted to candidacy and then abandoned by institutional support (financially, academically, or psychologically). Feeling unsupported for long stretches is certainly the most common experience of thesis research and writing. Indeed, the popular image of a thesis-writing graduate is a pasty-skinned student working alone in a dimly lit campus office late at night. And most students, if queried, would probably say feeling unsupported is the worst part of doing a thesis. But it’s possible that feeling unsupported is integral and important to the thesis process. In fact, it may be one of the most important learning opportunities the thesis provides.
Before starting your thesis, you probably received substantial support from your institution—regular faculty contact, structured learning, designated topics of study, mandatory attendance, regular performance feedback, financial aid, and so on. But once you began a thesis, these support structures likely shrank or disappeared. As do most graduate students, when you realized you were truly on your own, you may have felt—however briefly—panic, discouragement, anger, or fear.
The situation is analogous to that of teenagers who suddenly realize their parents won’t support them for the rest of their lives and, in fact, expect them to get out of the house and make a life of their own. Teenagers love their parents, but resent their parents for nudging them out. So, too, graduate students are informed—directly or indirectly—that their long dependency on institutional support is over, and it’s time for them to succeed on their own.
Lack of support while conducting research and writing a publishable work is normal in the academy. If you realize this is the standard operating procedure, you can eliminate feeling personally abused, recover your equilibrium, and take initiative to generate your own support. The lesson is to recognize how alone you are, to realize that feeling unsupported is the challenge to be met, and then to do what you can to get the support you need. Learning how to feel supported in an unsupportive environment is perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from writing a thesis. Facing the fact of your essential aloneness and mustering the wherewithal to generate your own support is achieving academic adulthood.

Feeling Unsupported is Natural

The fact is, graduate institutions are highly competitive knowledge factories, where very, very bright people compete for increasingly scarce resources. Graduate school is especially competitive, pitting students against one another for limited resources, reputations, and eventual jobs. You may be competing with your closest colleague for a fellowship or research assistantship. Your grant proposal may be in direct competition with one from your office mate. Your submitted article may be competing for publication with papers from colleagues you greatly admire. You may be competing with your best friend for a plum academic appointment.

Professors who have been in academe a long time have learned how to handle conflicted feelings of working with colleagues in such a competitive, unsupportive environment, but for graduate students conducting their first major publishable research, the situation can be traumatic. Moreover, students usually feel less support as they continue working on their theses.

• Students often feel they’re expected to know what to do and how to do it with little guidance. Many, if not most, feel confused or overwhelmed when trying to get started.
• Advisors have their own agendas which don’t give thesis advising high priority. They’re immersed in their own research and publishing cycles with little time or incentive to focus on student research.
• Graduate students have little power or clout within their academic departments. Certainly they have little recourse when faced with advisor or faculty disinterest or lack of time.
• Once departmental thesis seminars or writing groups cease to function, students are left mainly on their own, with little regular peer contact. The support garnered from fellow students is gone.
• The activities of doing a thesis—library research, thinking, writing, and so on—are generally solitary activities. Writing especially requires one to be fully on one’s own.
• Thesis activities have no specified or structured format. Each thesis is unique and therefore little experience can be directly transferred from one thesis writer to another.
• Soon after beginning a thesis, students realize employment and domestic demands won’t lessen to accommodate thesis demands. If significant others don’t take up the slack, students may feel a lack of support on the job or home front as well.

Finding Support IS the Lesson

Fortunately, as a graduate student, you’re able to do any number of things to generate support. The important thing is not to wait for support to appear, but to proactively work to generate it. Dismiss the naive idea that support will be automatically delivered without effort on your part. Make generating support a thesis activity. Plan a strategy. Write steps on your calendar to carry out your plan. Become an ardent, enthusiastic generator of thesis support.
Learn to accept support that’s given. Sometimes you might not recognize support because you’re expecting it to look like something else. Be eternally grateful for all support you’re offered of whatever ilk. Certainly you want timely, expert advisory support; and you need timely, accurate information regarding rules, regulations, and bureaucratic procedures. But there are many other kinds of support as well. An abundance of support in one area can compensate for a lack of support in another.
•Change your expectations about what qualifies as support. What you consider a lack of support might be seen by another student as sufficient support. You feel lack of support because you expect a certain kind and amount. Adjust your expectations so that you feel supported by the support you receive.

•Clarify your agenda so you know what you need and then ask for it in a way that makes it likely you’ll get it. Only you know what you need, want, and expect from others. No one else can read your mind. Others have their own ideas of how to support you, and they’ll act on their ideas until you inform them of yours. You have to state your needs and wants in a way that will engender support.

•Learn to play politics. Build a power base of supporters to whom you can go and on whom you can rely. Be methodical. Identify people who can support you. List specific ways in which they can support you with their power, influence, resources, or good will. Don’t worry about becoming Machiavellian. You’re just systematizing what you normally do on a much more casual basis with all your relationships.

•Find out what potential supporters want that you have. Offer your resources to them. Eventually you might be able to make a quid pro quo offer to exchange your resources for theirs.

•There’s power in numbers. Network! Join advocacy groups. Join thesis support groups. If your department doesn’t sponsor such groups, form one of your own. Join on-line support groups. Use e-mail discussion forums to share information and remain connected to other thesis-writing students.

•Reciprocity is the name of the game. Provide support for others. Generously share information. Keep others informed of opportunities. When you see something others might use, make a note of it and pass it along. Share references and resources when you can.
To engender support for your thesis, you have to act in forward looking ways to achieve your own ends rather than reacting to what the world delivers. The failure to feel supported is often the failure to design, negotiate, and pursue a process that moves you toward attaining your own academic ends. Taking responsibility to get the support you need to succeed is the essence of academic adulthood.

“[. . . expect more support] to come from individual faculty, peers, and relationships outside the ‘system’ than from the system itself. . . . Above all, don’t expect nurturing. In the final analysis, doctoral pursuit is a lonely quest of heart and head.” - Hawley
This article copyrighted by ASGS. Please obtain permission to use or reproduce. Thank you.

Getting a Smart Start on Your Thesis is extracted from Thesis News No. 28. Other articles in this issue include:

  • Achieving Academic Adulthood
  • Thesis Support Groups
  • Organizing Support Groups
  • Thesis Street Smarts
  • Working the System
  • Political Savvy for the Thesis.

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